 So, I wanted to take a few moments to talk about the Linus Tech Tips Linux Challenge that they've been talking about now for a couple weeks. And I wasn't originally going to do this video because, honestly, it doesn't really matter all that much to me and a few other Linux YouTubers have talked about it. But I've been paying attention to their podcast. I don't watch all their videos, but I listen to their podcast and that's where they've been talking about the logistics of them switching to Linux and planning out this entire series of videos that they're going to do about them switching to Linux. And I've noticed a few things and I wanted to talk about them because I think that the number of people who pay attention to that channel has the potential to be really good for people switching to Linux. I think it could bring a lot of new people in. I also think that if they do it wrong that it has the potential to drive just a ton of people away. So it could be an utter disaster. And the more they talk about it on their podcast, the more I'm leaning towards this being an utter disaster for Linux because the thing about Linux is that you can't be unwilling to get help and it doesn't feel like that is part of their rules. Now I could be wrong. Maybe they are asking for help. They haven't actually made their videos yet. So we only know part of what they've done so far. But it feels like they've experienced some problems that are just really weird and they haven't sought out solutions or help for those problems. And the way they're talking about it I feel is going to be or could have a negative effect on Linux itself. Now Linux obviously is not going to go away because you know they do a negative review or something. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just more saying that the perception of Linux over the last year has gotten way better because of things like steam and proton and all that stuff. If this comes out and ends up being a completely negative experience for them it could have a negative impact on that image that Linux has built up over the last year as being much more modern than it used to be in terms of gaming and such like that. So just a few things that I want to hit on. First of all they're using Nvidia as their graphics cards and they're having problems. By surprise as Linus Torvalds has done and has become a meme. Fuck you Nvidia. We all know that that's the thing right. Nvidia is not a good first class citizen on Linux. It never has been. It has gotten better but it's still not good. So they would have been way better off using AMD and they have noted that they would be better off using AMD. But another thing they're having problems with is that they both or at least Linus seems to be using very cutting edge gear in his computer and if you've ever done that you'll know that you oftentimes have a bad experience because it takes quite a while sometimes six to eight months for new hardware to get not only included in the Linux kernel that usually happens fairly quickly but it takes a while for the bugs and stuff like that to get ironed out and work their way into the mainstream kernel because you know people have to test this stuff and the people who do the testing and stuff like that oftentimes don't even have access to the high end hardware that they have to test so they rely on the community to test and report bugs and such so it takes time and that's going to be a huge issue I feel for both of those guys who are switching to Linux because they always have the top end gear and Linux doesn't do well with that so that's going to be a huge issue. Another thing that I found interesting is that they did a poll on which distro they should switch to and I'm really hoping that they didn't take that seriously because one of the distros they had on there was Gentoo like I have no problem with the Gentoo folks I've met several of them they're all really good people and one day I will switch to Gentoo for a while a certain amount of time a day something like that but it's definitely not a distribution that you should get into as a beginner just I mean I don't I think even the Gentoo guys would mostly agree that that's not a beginner's distro that if you've never done Linux before chances are you shouldn't start with Gentoo and the fact that they put that on their poll kind of makes me really nervous that was the first indication I had that their Linux challenge was going to be a disaster so the thing that worries me the most is that this isn't going to be a one-off so like they're not going to be just making one video they're planning on five videos and the thing about that is that that means that if this is a completely negative experience for them which I don't think it's going to be completely negative but I think they're going to have a lot of negative stuff to say that means that all the negative press that next is going to get from this it is going to be spread out over a period of weeks and that's going to be it's not going to be great a great time and that kind of leads me into the final thing I want to talk about no matter what happens they're going and they've talked about this on their podcast they're going to experience the wonderful nature of Linux trolls and there are a lot of them out there and there are people who are on the many spectrums of troll that will come out of the woodwork to comment on their videos and it's going to be an interesting experience I think for them because the the Linux troll is a very unique beast they are very passionate about whatever niche they've found themselves in and if you do something even a little bit away from how they think you should do it you're going to hear from it now I don't think that it was going to matter to them obviously they get millions and millions of comments so they're just going to be the the trolls are just going to get drowned in the noise but I do think that that negativity from the trolls is probably going to spill out on several other channels and probably filter down to the smaller people now I don't think that'll filter down to me because I'm just a a itsy bitsy youtuber with 5000 subscribers yes 5000 subscribers but I do think that that the it's going to piss a lot of their series is going to piss a lot of people off if they do something even just a little bit different than the way they should have done it and as we all know I mean in Linux there's 12 different ways of doing everything so each way that they could do something has their fans so if you know some people like the terminal we have terminal fans some people like the gooey's and they have the gooey fans and you know all these different ways of doing things they all have their supporters and they're all going to come out of the woodwork when inevitably linus and luke choose a different way of doing things or they do things a certain way but they do it in the wrong way because they're used to doing it so yeah I think that that's going to be a definite problem uh I did just think of something else some of the problems that they have talked about like before they like said they haven't done their video that but they've been talking about it in their podcast some of the problems that they've been talking about like linus the other in in a a couple a few podcasts ago or two podcasts ago said something about linux forcing him to restart I've been using linux now for over four years I've never once had linux forced me to restart now there are moments where you should restart but you don't have to you can use your computer as long as you want until you do eventually restart it's perfectly fine it just means your updates that you've done won't be won't take effect until you go through and do a reboot and that's the same on pretty much every operating system only the difference is on windows you're forced to do it they just do it for you like you don't have a choice on linux you do it whenever you want to so I don't know what the hell he's talking about there another thing in the the clip that I just watched was he was talking about how windows seem to snap into place like it's not smooth like the experience and linux hasn't been smooth for him and now this could be something to do with the graphics drivers that he's using that's possible but we also don't know what distribution he's chosen if he's chosen something like fedora and he's using weyland he could be having problems with hardware compatibility you know because the the Nvidia support for weyland is just still really really new and it's not very good yet so that's definitely could be a problem I don't know what like I said we don't know what distribution he's they've chosen so it's going to be an interesting experience it's going to be interesting to find out what they've chosen for their distros and that could have led to some of the problems that they're experiencing because they might have chosen something really weird the last thing I know I said the last thing earlier but the the last thing is they were talking about the audio problems that they're having now welcome to linux linus I mean seriously everyone and their brother has problems with audio it's just the nature of the beast pulse audio is good in fact pulse audio is fantastic when it works when it doesn't work it's utter garbage because you don't know how to fix it especially if you're new so you have their audio problems are probably going to be the thing that they focus on quite a bit and it's like I think that may be the one thing that draws all the linux community together and say yep audio still sucks sometimes on linux it happens uh you just got to kind of deal with it you know uh so those are my just some rambly thoughts on the challenge I could see it going both ways some positive some negative it's going to really depend on how they portray it I could see it being completely negative because as well as the press has gone for linux in terms of gaming over the last six months linux gaming is still very buggy in a lot of cases it really is I mean I mean it's way way way way better than it used to be but there are still tons of experiences through steam through looters whatever you choose that are just bad experiences and definitely bad much worse experiences than what you'd expect for a operating system that has been touted over the last six months is way better for gaming than it used to be so it's going this whole experience is going to be very interesting so those are my thoughts if you have thoughts on this challenge you should leave those in the 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